L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  Her social skills, however, were second to none, tested to the utmost once she made her salon debut. Trusting no one, she developed a relentless capacity for flattery, as was later spittingly recalled by another young woman she met at Miss Spence’s: the Irish beauty Rosina Wheeler, who became her boon companion for a time. Aware how important it was to secure allies in her perilous position, Letitia sought to win Rosina over by endlessly praising her looks. She addressed her as “carissima” or “ma belle Rose” in a play of assumed intimacy that rivals the affectation of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Elton in Emma with her “caro sposo.” Chameleon-like as ever, Letitia chatted to Rosina in the vernacular of the bright young things of the 1820s, who were as addicted to superlatives as those of the 1920s. A century apart, both generations embraced hedonism and heartless gaiety as a response to having been brought up in the shadow of war.

  Rosina’s mother, Anna Doyle Wheeler (c. 1780–1848), had escaped from an abusive marriage, contracted in Ireland when she was only fifteen, to become a radical feminist and socialist at a time when such ideas were increasingly relegated to the lunatic fringe. Her worldlier daughter, in contrast, was out to party rather than to protest. The penniless Rosina, her face her only fortune, was keen to secure herself through marriage. Letitia advised her on matters of courtship. “Marry ma charmante rose, and your London season will be the wonder of the morning post,” she told her winningly on November 30, 1825.

  Rosina’s fiancé, whom she met chez Miss Spence, was none other than Edward Bulwer, who had been such a keen reader of L.E.L. as an undergraduate. A would-be mini-Byron himself, he had published a volume of verse while still at Cambridge and had followed yet more closely in his hero’s footsteps by briefly serving as the raddled Caroline Lamb’s toy boy. He became ensorcelled by the gorgeous Rosina, whom he married (against his mother’s wishes) in 1827.

  Letitia did not reveal much about her real situation to her new friends. In 1826, Bulwer told a correspondent that L.E.L. was “only eighteen” (she was by then twenty-four) and “a Dean’s daughter, or something of that sort” (it was her uncle who was the dean of Exeter). She had clearly exaggerated both her youth and her social credentials in an effort to make herself more appealing, a sign of how insecure she must have felt.

  Bulwer went on to become a best-selling novelist, a member of Parliament from 1831, and subsequently a cabinet minister. By 1834, however, following infidelities on both sides, his marriage had begun to dissolve into the most vitriolic and public separation since the Byrons’. Bulwer remained loyal to Letitia for life, but Rosina turned against her around the time their marriage collapsed, going on to allege in an angry private memorandum that Letitia was Bulwer’s “cast-off” mistress.

  Given Rosina’s florid paranoia—she later accused her estranged husband of committing sodomy with Disraeli to get into the cabinet—that cannot be taken too seriously. What is clear from the on-the-spot sources is that during the 1820s Letitia and Jerdan used both Bulwers as pawns in their own game of hearts, and as a cover for their affair. “Mr Jerdan says…he thinks it too bad and too exorbitant of you to be both the beauty and the wit,” Letitia told Rosina in a letter full of frisky badinage in 1825, in which she thanks Rosina for sending a delightful epigram and caricature of Jerdan. Jerdan was obviously looking over Letitia’s shoulder as she wrote, titillated by the idea of employing his young lover as a conduit through which to flirt with her best friend.

  Bulwer himself was relaxed, he told Jerdan, about “witnessing the usual flirtation which takes place between you and Mrs Bulwer when ever…you meet.” But outsiders were shocked by the attentions Letitia openly paid to Rosina’s husband. When the recently married Bulwers gave a country house party, a fellow guest noted with distaste how outrageously Miss Landon flirted with the host. The same guest also recorded, as an apparent afterthought, that William Jerdan happened to be staying overnight too, unaware of the implications.

  Rosina was not wrong to spot that there was a private understanding between her husband and Letitia. However, the intimacy that subsisted between them was that between a man of the world and a fallen woman whose situation, though unspoken, he could acknowledge in a way that no lady could have done. Rosina, who was hardly unworldly, must have had more of an inkling about Letitia’s relationship with Jerdan than she later claimed to have had. Yet in line with the rules of demi-connaissance, Letitia did not openly confide in her carissima.

  By 1825 Letitia’s social rise was such that she was receiving some rather grand invitations. “I have been quite a round of dinner parties, very pleasant to myself but very indescribable,” she told Rosina archly. As ambivalent toward conspicuous consumption as she had been when she satirized the West Indian dandy, she noted that “at one the table was so covered with gold plate that I began to look somewhat anxiously for a dish that had something in it.”

  By now, Letitia was also a hostess herself, though her own rather more down-at-heel salon was held at her grandmother’s Sloane Street apartment. According to her memoirist Katherine Thomson, “Nothing could be more lively than these little social meetings and nothing more unexceptionable.”

  The gatherings, at which Jerdan was a frequent presence, were undoubtedly more riotous than Mrs. Thomson let on. They certainly included dancing, which must have been sweatily close in the confines of a flat so small that the living room opened directly onto the bedroom. In one surviving early letter, Letitia invited fellow Gazette writer Alexander Alaric Watts to an impromptu “quadrille” party.

  Letitia’s celebrity profile was given a fillip in April 1825 when her portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Like L’Improvisatrice of 1823, it was painted by H. W. Pickersgill. In an effort to maximize publicity, the earlier image was borrowed back from its buyer, the Marquess of Lansdowne, and exhibited simultaneously in the Royal Academy’s spillover gallery at the British Institution (the rule was that no picture could be exhibited twice in the main venue). Visitors that year were thus presented with a bona fide portrait of Miss Landon in one gallery, and a staged image of a fantasy improvvisatrice in another. Nothing could better illustrate the diffusion of self that Letitia’s public image entailed.

  Inconveniences in Quadrille Dancing by George Cruikshank. Letitita hosted quadrille parties in her grandmother’s cramped apartment.

  The 1825 portrait, known from the engraving made for Jerdan’s autobiography in the 1850s, is innocuous-looking to the modern eye (see plates). To knowing contemporaries, however, it encoded Letitia’s ambiguous identity. Those who invested in Letitia’s purity were scandalized. The critic for the European Magazine complained that Pickersgill had “made a modest and retiring young lady a virago-looking Amazonian in a Spanish hat, which unquestionably the improvisatrice never wore.”

  The portrait shows Letitia wearing her hair in the innocent à l’enfant style. She is, however, also sporting faux-historical slashed sleeves and the objectionable flamboyant feathered hat. The hair said “infant genius,” but the costume suggested a female Don Juan. It mimicked that worn by the racy actress Madame Vestris when she appeared en travestie in the title role in the recent vaudeville hit Giovanni in London (see plates).

  Letitia is also smiling enough for her teeth to be visible. As Colin Jones has shown in The Smile Revolution, such details had a wealth of hidden meaning. Only actresses smiled in portraits. In Pickersgill’s many portraits of respectable high-society ladies, the sitters’ mouths are closed. “When she was in the first flush of her fame, Pickersgill made her the subject of one of his most perfect pictures—as a picture, but I never thought it like; it was too womanly, too self-confident for L.E.L.,” Anna Maria Hall later complained, objecting to it as too sexualized.

  The exhibition of the portrait was designed to usher in Letitia’s next work, The Troubadour, published that summer, a mere year after The Improvisatrice. Written in the third person, the new book showed a marked retreat from L.E.L.
’s earlier erotic confessionalism. Afraid that she had gone too far in risking her reputation, Letitia was attempting to improvise a fresh identity.

  The new book had an autobiographical postscript in which she played up the image of herself as an innocent little girl. Writing in a style so childlike as to be almost doggerel, she recalled the success of The Improvisatrice, including a politic note of modest thanks to the reviewers who had applauded it: “Scarce possible it seem’d to be / That such praise could be meant for me.” She then went on to reveal that the triumph of The Improvisatrice had been overshadowed by personal tragedy, recording her sorrow at the death of her father, which had indeed taken place in November 1824:

  My page is wet with bitter tears,—

  I cannot but think of those years

  When happiness and I would wait

  On summer evenings by the gate…

  Then run for the first kiss, and word,—

  An unkind one I never heard.

  But these are pleasant memories,

  And later years have none like these:

  They came with griefs, and pains, and cares,

  All that the heart breaks while it bears.

  John Landon—for whom Letitia had in reality been accustomed to wait at the gate of Trevor Park in childhood—appears to have been an affectionate father, for all his improvidence. Letitia had been genuinely fond of him. However, L.E.L. had by now taken over her life so entirely, disrupting the norms of private and public, that she exploited her recent bereavement to gain the sympathy of wavering readers.

  In fact, her innocent-seeming filial tribute was designed to keep her identity in suspension. It reinforced the idea that all her first-person work was literally autobiographical, thus promoting the suspicion that her previous love confessions had been equally authentic. The Troubadour was blatantly dedicated to William Jerdan, thanking him for his “surveillance.”

  Jerdan responded with a typically effusive review in the Literary Gazette. As ever, he puffed his protégée shamelessly, claiming she was “endowed by nature with talents so far above the general lot as to be justly entitled to present admiration and future immortality.” As if fearing that the new note of filial piety might cancel out L.E.L.’s hard-won image of sexual allure, he reminded readers that she was a “gifted individual who commands all the range of human passions.” He also recommended that she must undertake “severer studies” if she wants to “attain…the greatest name in the annals of…imaginative female literature, whether of ancient or modern times.” L.E.L.’s literary Pygmalion was still there in the wings, urging her on.

  Elsewhere, The Troubadour was well reviewed. The New Monthly Magazine pronounced it “beautiful and graceful.” The Times called L.E.L. “no common writer” and praised her “extraordinary facility and power of expression.” The Examiner pointed to her “exquisite finish.”

  However, a backlash was forming. The Examiner also quoted a passage in The Troubadour about a fictional poet damaged by empty praise. “Take the hint, Mr Jerdane [sic] and be more discriminative and less magnificent in future, especially when a work has benefited from your own surveillance,” it concluded personally.

  The Westminster Review went further in a considered article on L.E.L.’s oeuvre, which drew attention to her sexual subtexts, “sickly thoughts clothed in glittering language that draws the eye off from their real character.” Though acknowledging her “poetical talent,” it advised her “to avoid the subject of love” in future, and, especially, “not to be elated by the praise or guided by the…critical judgement of the Literary Gazette.” It was a warning to disentangle herself from Jerdan.

  William Jerdan, meanwhile, was a man visibly on the rise. In 1825, he moved his family into a house every bit as prestigious as the mansion from which the Landons had been evicted in 1820. His new home, Grove House, sometimes known as Brompton Grove, was situated on the Brompton Road, a stone’s throw from where he had first seen Letitia with her hoop. It had a thirty-two-by-eighteen-foot drawing room, housed in an extension built by an earlier occupant in honor of a visit by the prince regent.

  Jerdan was tickled by the fact that his immediate predecessor as householder was the antislavery campaigner William Wilberforce, who had been instrumental in founding the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Wilberforce had, surprisingly, left behind a cellar of fine wines. In his autobiography, Jerdan confessed that he loved “ostensible wealth” and all life’s luxuries. He spared no expense in furnishing his new home. The kitchen cooker alone cost £100.

  While Letitia was establishing her small-scale female salon at 131 Sloane Street, Jerdan set about making Grove House the engine room of his ambitions. One contemporary recorded that “his house was ever open to the leading literary men, artists, dramatic authors and actors of the day.” He sent out invitations to the great and the good, the famous and the influential, although the extent to which they were accepted is debatable. He was widely rumored to be in the habit of running a wheelbarrow round the gravel in front of the house to give the impression of “carriage visitors.”

  The enthusiasm with which Jerdan boasts about his Grove House days in his autobiography suggests that he was just as vocal in his own praise at the time. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he aroused envy among strugglers in the literary trade. Few knew that Jerdan had paid for Grove House and its extravagant furnishings by running up a massive £4,000 debt.

  The financial crisis of 1816, which ruined John Landon, was not an isolated incident. The roller-coaster economy dipped again in 1824–25. The world of literature was no more protected than any other business. By 1825, the publishing boom of the early 1820s was becoming an unsustainable bubble.

  In March 1826, The Sunday Times was prompted to defend the industry against charges of fiscal irresponsibility, in terms that suggest crisis mode:

  We are happy to be enabled to state that the grounds of our defence of the Booksellers generally, against the calumny of a Daily Paper, were perfectly correct; and that although one or two have by over-speculation (circumstances which happen among the members of all trades, without calling down on the trade generally a sweeping denunciation), not only embarrassed their own concerns, but disarranged for a time those of indisputably solvent houses, the great body of the trade have gallantly weathered the storm, and come into port with flying colours. They have with great prudence, for the present suspended the amount of publication, by which for several years (a pretty ground of charge, forsooth on the part of any member of the community of letters, unless it be some disappointed Grubean) they stimulated talented rivalry, and patronized authors with a liberality unprecedented.

  In an insecure environment, the Gazette seemed to be aggressively determined to expand its market share at the expense of others. Jerdan seemed to be benefiting. An anonymous flyer sent to publishing houses in January 1825 accused him of corruption. Illustrated with an image of a chamber pot, it was a spoof prospectus for “The Literary Jordan,” satirically promoting it as “the best receptacle” for the “effusions” of the “literary body.” It alleged that there was an unhealthy relationship between advertising and editorial at the Literary Gazette, and that Jerdan would accept any article or poem as long as it was submitted “accompanied by the expected gratuity of a one pound note.” He was said to dispense positive reviews on the same principle, and damnation to those who did not comply. A pointed reference to the “effusions” of “literary ladies” was a harbinger of what was to come.

  Backstage, Letitia had not been spending all her time making frilly caps for her grandmother and attending gold-plated dinners. By 1825 she had become so involved in the day-to-day running of the Gazette that Jerdan later described her in his autobiography as his effective coeditor, although her role was never formally acknowledged. She was widely known in the industry to be the author of many of the Gazette’s anonymous reviews and to spare none of h
er vitriol. In this, she exceeded even the coeditor’s requirements. In one extant note she admits to Jerdan that she now sees the error of “butting” (i.e., of making reviewees the butt of her attacks) and promises to be “so positive” in the future.

  According to Blanchard, it was those writers who had suffered at Letitia’s hands, and those who envied her success, who now began to spread negative rumors about her morals. “What malignity begins,” he opined disingenuously in his 1841 life, “ignorant, idle, even sometimes well-meaning gossip, finishes. Those who professed to know nothing about her, aided by their silly curiosity the insidious objects of those who might falsely pretend to know.”

  Blanchard retrospectively attributed the rumors to Letitia’s overexuberant social manner, which he put down to her naiveté: “Unfortunately, the very unguardedness of her innocence served to arm even the feeblest malice with powerful stings; the openness of her nature, and the frankness of her manners, furnished the silly or ill-natured with abundant materials for gossip.”

  As is now clear, Letitia was no ingenue. But Blanchard was perhaps right to suppose that she underestimated the viper’s nest into which she had been thrust by becoming a “public character.” With respectable married ladies from Mrs. Howitt to Mrs. Hall closing their eyes to her “fallen state,” she was living in a bubble. She later depicted the psychological experience of celebrity as treacherously cocooning: